World News Quick Take

Agencies

Wed, Sep 05, 2012 - Page 7

INDIA

Jilted lover kills five

A jilted New Delhi resident upset over the marriage of his girlfriend to another man shot her and four others dead before turning his gun on himself, a report said yesterday. The 25-year-old man, named as Ravi, shot the woman, her new husband and her landlady in one location on Monday morning before traveling to a suburb to kill her father and sister, the Press Trust of India news agency reported. Ravi, who had allegedly continued his relationship with his ex-girlfriend even after her marriage over a year ago, was unhappy with her family who had prevented him from marrying her, a senior police official was quoted as saying.

ALGERIA

New prime minister named

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika named Abdelmalek Sellal as the country’s new prime minister on Monday, ending political uncertainty almost four months after parliamentary elections. According to convention, Ahmed Ouyahia should have stepped down as prime minister following the poll, after which Bouteflika should have either invited Ouyahia back or named a new person for the job. None of this has happened, and the delay in naming a new prime minister and government paralyzed politics. An official statement said 75-year-old Bouteflika had “put an end to the functions of Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia, who has presented the resignation of the government.” The names of the other ministers in the new government were to be announced yesterday.

CHINA

Military official suspended

A military official has been suspended and placed under investigation over accusations of a drunken assault on a flight attendant, the state-run China Daily said yesterday. Fang Daguo was suspended from his job with the armed forces department of Guangzhou, the newspaper said, after a stewardess accused him of assaulting her in a dispute over his hand luggage. Zhou Yumeng had posted pictures on Sina Weibo showing injuries she said Fang inflicted, triggering uproar on popular social networking sites. Xinhua news agency said Fang and his wife “stank of alcohol” when they boarded the flight from Hefei to Guangzhou, and that Fang grabbed Zhou’s arm hard enough to bruise it. Officials in Guangzhou’s Yuexiu district, where Fang is employed, said last week an investigation had found him innocent, but changed tack after Xinhua disputed their account. Fang and his wife have reportedly apologized to Zhou.

SOUTH KOREA

Man wins compensation

A Seoul court yesterday awarded a fisherman compensation of more than US$2 million for being tortured and imprisoned in the 1980s on false charges of spying for Pyongyang. The Seoul Central District court ordered a payment of 2.45 billion won (US$2.2 million) to the fisherman, identified as Cheong, and six of his family members named in the compensation suit, a court spokesman said. Cheong, along with dozens of other fishermen, was briefly detained in the North in 1965 after they were seized while collecting shellfish on an islet in the Yellow Sea. In 1982, he was taken into custody by Seoul’s military-backed government and grilled for 13 days by counter-espionage agents who accused him of spying for the North. Released without charge, he was detained again the following year for 38 days, and ended up signing a confession under torture which led to his wife and brother confessing under similar duress. Cheong, now 71, served 15 years in prison before being released on parole in 1998.

NETHERLANDS

Teenage killer jailed

A court on Monday jailed a teenage boy for stabbing a 15-year-old girl to death and trying to kill her father after she had allegedly posted derogatory comments about another girl on Facebook. The boy, identified as 15-year-old Jing Hua K, was jailed for a year and ordered to spend at least two years in a psychiatric facility for the Jan. 14 murder in Arnhem. The sentence is the maximum in the Netherlands for a minor. “The court is of the opinion the defendant deliberately killed” the girl, Joyce Hau, known as Winsie to her friends, as well as attempted to murder her father, judges said in a verdict which was posted online. Prosecutors told the court the murder happened after Hau had had a fight on the social networking site Facebook with a 16-year-old friend, who was identified as Polly W. Prosecutors said Polly’s boyfriend, 17-year-old Wesley C, then allegedly telephoned and spoke to Jing Hua K via Facebook to arrange the killing, and also allegedly discussed the possibility of killing Hau’s entire family. Jing Hua K went to Hau’s home, saying he had something to give her. When she came to the door, he repeatedly stabbed her with a knife and then attacked her father, scarring his face for life, the court heard.

UNITED STATES

‘Green Mile’ actor dies

Actor Michael Clarke Duncan, nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of a death row inmate in the 1999 drama The Green Mile, died on Monday, less than eight weeks after suffering a heart attack, a spokeswoman said. He was 54. Duncan died in Los Angeles, his fiancee, the reality television star Omarosa Manigault, said in a statement through Duncan’s publicist, Joy Fehily. Details on the cause of death were not released. He suffered a heart attack on July 13 and “never fully recovered,” Fehily said. With a commanding screen presence from his deep voice and hulking 1.96m frame, Duncan once dug ditches for the gas company in his native Chicago, then moved to Los Angeles to pursue his career as an actor. He worked as a bodyguard and bouncer and played a few roles of that kind in film and television, before landing a small part in the 1998 movie Armageddon.

NIGERIA

Cocaine found in chicken

The roasted chickens had an unusual stuffing — US$150,000 worth of cocaine, police said. A mechanic who struggled in Brazil for more than six years had hoped the drugs would buy him a life of luxury in his native land, authorities said on Monday. “This was like a retirement plan for him,” said Mitchell Ofoyeju, spokesman for the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency. The accused was arrested over the weekend at the airport in Lagos after he came in from Sao Paulo with 2.6kg of cocaine, Ofoyeju said. Photos from the agency showed egg-shaped packages wrapped in gold aluminum foil and tucked into the browned chickens.

UNITED STATES

Cheeseburger breaks record

A Minnesota casino has cooked up a world-record bacon cheeseburger that’s 3m in diameter and weighs more than a tonne. The behemoth burger was served up Sunday at the Black Bear Casino Resort near Carlton. It tipped the scales at 914km. Guinness Records representative Philip Robertson verified the record for biggest burger. A Duluth News Tribune report says the previous mark was a mere 400kg. Black Bear’s burger included 27kg of bacon, 23kg of lettuce, 23kg of sliced onions, 18kg of pickles and 18kg of cheese.